Saturday, 13 February 2016

IMPROVE YOUR WORD POWER

Last Saturday I arrived at Dunston UTS after a tortuous journey on the number 10 bus. Only one other passenger on the top deck was over 15 and not singing along to One Direction - the man who sat behind me and coughed down the back of my neck from Branch End Garage to Blaydon.

At the gate I found that the admission charge for the FA Vase replay had been raised from £6 to £7. In solidarity with fans on Merseyide I considered walking out in protest after seven minutes, but decided that - on balance - £7 still represented pretty good value. My reward was a cracking game on a pitch that in the current age would likely be characterised as 'vintage' and have an outrageous price tag slapped on it by a young man dressed as a Victorian poacher. I also saw my 100th goal of the season. Sadly it was an injury time winner for visitors Ashford United - my second NL 2-3 Vase defeat on the trot. I ll stay away from Morpeth next week.

The latest issue of The Blizzard podcast features a reading of my piece about Adam Boyd. You can listen to it here:

Today I am walking to Ryton and Crawcrook Albion with Mike Amos as part of his Last Legs Challenge. The last time we walked anywhere together was in Bishop Auckland when we covered the distance from The Stanley Jefferson to the station in record time. Here's something I wrote for WSC about that evening.

Emmott Robinson played cricket for Yorkshire in the
inter-War years. Late in life the all-rounder complained that the general
public’s perception of him came entirely through the writing of Guardian
cricket correspondent Neville Cardus. ‘I reckon Mr Cardus invented me,’
Robinson said wearily.

Though he played over 400 times for his county, Robinson
never got an international cap. No film of him exists. His doughty manner, his
gruff, unruly style, his mad devotion to the game he loved, lives on almost
exclusively in Cardus’ prose.

The point of writing, William Faulkner said, is to fix
movement to the page, so that when the reader comes along it moves again. Back
in Cardus’ day that was what sports journalists did, captured action. Writing
was a medium of record, often the only medium.

Things have changed. If Emmott Robinson was around nowadays
there’d be hours of footage of him on YouTube. Film has superseded writing.
Newspaper websites are peppered with video clips. Even editors don’t trust
words to do the job anymore. Why read about a Lionel Messi goal, if you can watch it? Even
those of us who make a living from it must occasionally wonder - as we see the
bloke beside us filming the goal celebrations on his mobile - what the point of
writing is in the age of the smartphone and the tablet.

At the start of the summer I gave a talk at Auckland Castle,
a tie-in with the excellent exhibition on Bishop Auckland FC - Birth of the
Blues - that is currently showing there. Afterwards members of the audience
came up to chat. Many had brought with them bags containing mementos of
North-East non-League football: winners medals from long-forgotten local cup
competitions, Amateur Cup Final programmes, photographs in gilded frames. All
the items had tales attached, a memory trail to long dead relatives, to pit villages
once lived in.

A lady in her mid-seventies opened her handbag, pulled from
it an autograph album covered in tartan cloth. Her parents, she said, had been
involved with Stanley United back in the 1950s. ‘When I was a teenage girl,’
she said, ‘I served the players their post-match teas, and I got them all to
sign my book.’

Stanley United was one of the oldest clubs in Durham. They
won the Northern League title three times. Stanley United played at Mount
Pleasant. Like many places in Britain it seemed to have been named by someone
of ironic bent. Mount Pleasant was on a freezing crag above Crook, so isolated and
windswept the white-washed two-story clubhouse, where the players changed and
ate, and the spectators defrosted at half-time in front of coal fire, was
nicknamed ‘The Little House of the Prairie’.

The lady opened the tartan-covered book. ‘Here, look,’ she
said, ‘The Bishops team, 1955.’ She ran a finger under the signatures, the
well-practiced autographs of men who were the superstars of the amateur game:
Bob Hardisty, Corbett Cresswell, eccentric ‘keeper Harry Sharratt who once
built a snowman on his goal line. I pointed at one which had an extra flourish:
Seamus O’Connell

Seamus O’Connell was Bishops’ wealthy and glamorous
inside-forward. He also played as an amateur for Chelsea and Middlesbrough,
rejecting the chance to make a full-time career of the game at Stamford Bridge with
the words, ‘It’s no kind of job for a man’. An infamous womaniser, O’Connell
was allegedly so well-endowed that, after catching a glimpse of him naked in
the shower, one London society hostess remarked, ‘Built like that you really
ought to trot.’

The woman with the tartan autograph book grinned. ‘Eee, aye’
she said ‘Seamus O’Connell. He once give me a lift home over the moor top in
his sports car,’ and she shivered with delight at the thought of it.

‘So you must have known Geoff Strong, then.’ I said.

Geoff Strong was the centre-forward at Stanley in 1957.
Between the start of the season and Christmas he scored 31 goals. Arsenal came
looking to sign him. They offered Strong £13 a week. It was a tougher decision
than you might think. The amateurs of Stanley were paying him £10 a week ‘boot
money’ and he picked up another £4 as an apprentice fitter. In the end he
decided to take the pay cut and move to Highbury. He scored 69 goals for the
Gunners, then Bill Shankly bought him for Liverpool. He died two years ago.

The woman’s eyes twinkled when I said the name. ‘Ooh Geoff
Strong,’ she said, and she placed the autograph book down on the table we were
standing beside and ran her hands back and forwards across it. ‘I used to iron
his number nine shirt every week,’ she said, looking at the tartan book as if
it was the targetman’s red-and-white striped jersey, pressing her palms down on
it to smooth out the wrinkles, ‘And, you know, I always ironed that shirt with
love.’

Stanley United folded in 2003. The Little House on the Prairie
was burned down by arsonists. Only the goalposts and the memories now remain. And
memories don’t last forever. As Jorge Luis Borges noted, ‘one thing, or an
infinite number of things dies in every final agony’ never to return.

To be recalled is the only afterlife we can be guaranteed.
That’s part of the reason we tell strangers stories from our lives. It’s why I
write them down. It’s why you should too. If we don’t, one day it will all be
gone, YouTube or not.

Really enjoyed this when I read it in WSC. Now I think it's one of the best pieces of sports writing I've read. Given I keep my WSc magazines, I should re-read it more often. Thanks for sharing it again.

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(Thanks to Kevin Donnelly for the photo)

About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.